Skyfall Discussion (spoilers allowed)

[FormerBondFan]

One more thought about Fleming influences. Some DC fans say this is just how Fleming wrote the books.

But which Fleming?

The Fleming who wrote the Casino Royale torture scene? Or the Fleming who wrote about a Korean manservant with a deadly bowler and liked to eat cats (Goldfinger) or had Bond flight with a giant squid (Dr. No)? Fleming has some dramatic moments but his stories also are like successors to pulp stories of the early 20th Century.

Skyfall has these moments too though (the fantastical side of Fleming). The dragons at the floating restaurant are very Fleming, particularly when one eats a villain.

I've been seeing comments on other forums about some bad CGI effects in Skyfall, particularly when it comes to the dragons. I'll have to see the film myself to make a proper judgement, but if the CGI effects in Skyfall are really as bad as some claim, then the filmmakers obviously haven't learned their lesson. With all these high film costs and fancy technology, you would figure that the effects would be much better. I don't like CGI in Bond at all, but if they must use it, then they could at least try to make it look better than a cheap video game.

I rather pay to see the new Star Wars episode than Skyfall.

[bjmdds]

Cavill as Han Solo?

[FormerBondFan]

Cavill as Han Solo?

Harrison will always be Han Solo. I say bring in new characters as the lead while keeping characters like R2 and C3PO.

[Napoleon Solo]

Spoilers, most are duplicates earlier in the thread, but:

-- Very end of pre-titles sequence: after being shot and falling off that tall bridge, Bond further falls down a waterfall. Sherlock Holmes reference?
-- Main titles: Bond shoots at mirrors. Homage to Orson Welles' The Lady From Shanghai? (Double reference since Shanghai is a location in the movie, even if the first unit never went there). Many film makers have done homages, including (but certainly not limited to) Blake Edwards in 1967's Gunn, a theatrical movie version of Peter Gunn.
-- M dies
-- Eve is Moneypenny, despite the semi-denials issued during filming
-- Mallory becomes the new M
-- End of the movie "loops" as if this Bond were about to start the Dr. No assignment.

Not in the movie:
M wasn't responsible for both Bond and Silva becoming orphans. (I liked that , especially since it was my idea)
Heineken isn't used as character development (also my idea). Oh well, that's the way it goes.

[Kristatos]

Not in the movie:
M wasn't responsible for both Bond and Silva becoming orphans. (I liked that , especially since it was my idea)
Heineken isn't used as character development (also my idea). Oh well, that's the way it goes.

I did call Dame Judi's f-bomb correctly, and that was meant to be a joke.

[bjamesobrad]

-- End of the movie "loops" as if this Bond were about to start the Dr. No assignment.

So by this do you mean 007 uses a Beretta threwout the movie and then has it jam up on him and nearly kill him?

Also with this ending the Connery era starts so we now have no need for Craig

[bjmdds]

Eon has no regard whatsoever for time continuity. This is ridiculous.

[English Agent]

Yes, there is a tiny bit of CGI in Skyfall.

Clue:- the villian

[The Saint 007]

Yes, there is a tiny bit of CGI in Skyfall.

Clue:- the villian

You mean when the villain removes his dentures?

I've been seeing comments about other CGI moments in Skyfall like certain explosions, a scene with helicopters, or the dragons, etc. Some people are saying these effects are not that great, but I'll just have to see myself.

[carl stromberg]

Great review on AJB:


Well, as you may have judged by some of my comments today, I saw the film last night and didn't rate it. Anyway... where to start? Skyfall is a bit like Adele's song. Her song is sumptuous, lush, well produced and impressive - it's just not a good tune really. Not one for the iPod. You wouldn't listen to it twice if it weren't a Bond song. Not like the brilliant songs of yesteryear, Nobody Does It Better, DAF, any of them really. I heard YOLT played on the radio straight after Skyfall, now that's a song, works as a song in its own right.

So it is with this film. It looks sumptuous, thanks to Roger Deakin's cinematography, and it has scope and ambition. It just isn't a good movie. It doesn't click for me. In a way it was the same with the director's other films, The Road to Perdition. It looked great, it was heavy with intent, and had a few fantastic scenes in it, but it just doesn't move along. In a way, SF made me think better of QoS, but not much. At least that is relatively grounded, but actually SF is the film QoS might have been had they finished the script and dumped the Bourne-style camera work. Which might be, you'd think, a great Bond film. But no, it has pretensions. These directors shouldn't be let near a Bond film. They can't tell which implausiblities you can get away with, and which you can't. I sense a slumming it vibe, as if to say, well, if this doesn't make sense who cares - it's only a Bond film. Both men are big on symbolism, which I hate in movies when it doesn't connect on its own surface meaning.

When did it mess up? Early on. Bond is on a bike, so far so good, except he's left an agent to die, another charming Mathis moment. He'll disobey M's order when he likes, but not in this case of course! We have a name for a bloke like this in England - jobsworth. Maybe that could be the name of the next Bond film, sung by Adele:

Jobsworth!
Get the T-shirt
From the foyer
That'll be another 15 pounds please

Anyway, big fail is when he has to get onto a moving train. Now, if you've ever watched Octopussy and thought that it badly needed a shot of Berkoff's General Orlov in a fight on the train in West Berlin, well, you're in luck as that's pretty much how Craig looks. He moves like a bloody crab and it's like it's meant to be like that... Anyway, most of us would pull up to the bridge and jump off, but our man crashed headlong the bike into the bridge and goes flying over, just hoping this will see him land on the train roof. Like you do. Perhaps Moore's Bond could have just crashed his dismantled car into the Pont Neuf and gone through the windscreen.

It goes on like this, silly stuff with the digger on the train takes this far away from the grounded quality of Casino Royale and really they're falling back on the old outrageous Bond stunts/routine to reel us in now. M is the professional irritant, but if Bond is not dead why does he look it when he falls into the water, because he has the camera on him? I mean why would you try to look dead if you're not actually? Shades of Bourne again... Lavish credits of the 'if you didn't like that one, here's another' variety overkill.

I'll keep it short. This is the Craig and Dench show. Both their characters are talked down - with total justification as far as I can see! They both seem to be idiots. Craig is said to be old and past it - only two films back they were trying to make out he was the young kid on the block! So when M is sad she thinks he's dead, why should she care? This isn't the Bond of legend, he's only been on two missions, not world beaters by any standard. This is one way the film tries to tap in to Bond's iconography at the expense of him as a real person. He just isn't a real guy in this film. Sure, Craig has white beard growth and looks 60 - he's good at that - but it's all a nonsense really.

I did like the scene where he is chilling and downing shots with the scorpion, that was cool. But we don't really know how long that has gone on for, weeks or months? Or how he survived the shot. I mean, he was shot wasn't he? Or, we are thinking, was it an elaborate hoax?

Then... how does he break into M's flat again, does she really have no security - and at a time like this, too, when someone is after MI6 and M specifically.

I think the nadir is when he cockily says he can save the trapped girl in Shanghai. Righty-ho! Sneaks on her ship, easily done. Walks naked into her shower, without a by your leave. Oh, the daft scene when he lets the black gal shave him - though he doesn't really know her and may well be a double agent at this stage in the game, ludicrous. Anyway, he thinks he can just show up on his own to meet the villain. Like you do. I mean, good luck with that. It starts to feel like The Man with the Golden Gun at this point, in terms of general believability - yet this is the rugged, credible Craig we're meant to go with.

CGI buildings on the island, like The Expendables 2.

Bond is shown to be morally repugnant of course when he is forced to shoot the drink off her head. It's just a nasty situation, are we meant to empathise and cherish a sociopath. Apparently, because he's British. There's no moral outrage in the bloke, like when he sees the receptionist get shot earlier. He just seems mildly interested. Anyway, at that point the helicopters show up to rescue Bond and there's this daft jubilant bit of brass! Like, hey ho, he's safe! No matter the girl he went out to save is, er, dead!

The villain, well, some sort of Lector/Joker hybrid rip off. During his opening monologue, you'd want Bond to interrupt and say 'Is this going to take long?' The film is littered with dialogue nods to other movies, 'Bring it back in one piece', 'the old ways are the best' and so on, I suppose like when you're banging a minger you might want the memory of past shags to carry you through...

Rubbish! Bond on the rush hour with unconvincing passengers, nothing like as credible as Bourne Supremacy. A tube train crashes - but no one is in it! The team lacked balls, they thought if something went off in Olympic year, they'd be stuffed. So it's the only tube train in rush hour not packed.

Bond of course has the chance to shoot Silva but doesn't, as you do. Bond runs like a robot in this, like Kryton from Red Dwarf. In the boat going across to the Shanghai casino, he looks like a tailor's dummy... But is it deliberate, perhaps? To show how heartless he is?

So it is with Dench's M, everyone calls her 'maam' in this, on and on it goes, is it meant to sound like 'mum'? Is it some ruse by the director, to make her seem a maternal figure? Or just irritating. Dench does her usual blather she's been on since GE about how there are no nations anymore, the villains are in the shadows. This tranlsates as 'We're too PC to make extremist Islam the bad guys'... and I guess she's not heard of Iran. Or Putin's Russia. Burma. China. Course not. Blimey, she deserves to be fired!

FFS! The Aston has an ejector seat. Erm... Don't think so. Or maybe the guy Bond won it off in CR was part of Q branch and had it installed. My mind was just whirling by this point.

To me, the director may be a fan boy, but so was Lee Tamahari. These types just fling a lot of stuff at the wall and hope it sticks.

So off to Scotland, to face up to the villain on your own, like you do. This maybe a metaphor for the Uk attitude to Europe. Or it may not, it may just be rubbish scriptwriting. Who knows? Logan signposts everything a great deal, there's a lot of talk and rubbish obvious exposition throughout the film, all tell don't show. Ooh, what a surprise that Mallory is not such a bad guy after all!

Off to Gotham Towers, for a standoff like the final scene of Bourne Identity, er, but that made sense cos Bourne really was on his own against the forces, whereas Bond isn't, it's just done for dramatic effect. Doesn't phone ahead, oh no. Finds out there are no guns, it all got sold off - cos they thought he was dead? It's a lot of info to take in. It's a different movie by this stage, I couldn't take it in.

M and new pal wandering about in the dark with a frickin torch! Like you would. You know, stay out of sight. Bond going in chase, though he doesn't know Silva is chasing them, for all he knows he's dead. Doesn't bother to pick up a gun from anonymous henchman before running into chapel. Shiny new tombstone from his parents on site. Bond closes his bosses eyes a bit quick, maybe it was wishful thinking! Silva, who seems suicidal, gets his wish to kill M. Bond is the Wayne Rooney of MI6, everyone talks him up, and he co**s it all up. Like in CR, when the villains get away with the money at the end, and the girl dies! What a man! So he takes it upon himself to 'protect' M and use her as bait, and she dies. Mallory gets the top job, which is what he wanted - no wonder he's so happy to see Bond at the end.

To cap it all? Bond: 'I didn't catch your name again... ' No? I mean, I haven't let Strangeways shave me, and I haven't shagged him either, we've met three times but I do know his name actually. I mean, you tend to introduce yourself, that's the way it goes. But Bond has done all that but he doesn't even know this bird's name, bloody hell, at least he knew Agent Fields' surname, if not that she was called Strawberry.

The message at the end is, right, after the revamp we've taken three films to get back to where we were before Dench arrived on the scene, with a secretary and a male boss. Though what Fiennes is doing in this, along with Ben Whishaw, I don't know, it's like a retirement home for theatre thesps looking to pay off a mortgage, they all seem a bit sheepish.

All in all, this film is as believable as Bond's stunt with the Queen for the Olympics, but more pretentious and not as funny.

[Napoleon Solo]

John Logan on the "bisexual" scene in Skyfall:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/0 ... ertainment

[bjmdds]

http://www.boston.com/ae/movies/2012/11 ... story.html

[The Saint 007]

John Logan on the "bisexual" scene in Skyfall:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/0 ... ertainment

I think the producers should not imply that sort of thing in the Bond films, because some of the fans are getting ideas.

[bjmdds]

Don't believe the hype
I am a Bond fan since the start and Craig is also my 2nd favourite Bond after Connery, but the reviewers of Skyfall aren't seeing the movie that's on screen. It's dull. The stakes are low. Aside from the opening action sequence which is as good as they've been, the story--and frankly, the villain--are both figuratively and in the case of Bardem, literally toothless. And the callous way Bond lets innocent civilians die without an ounce of preventative action is a rewrite of the character. The final conflagration is completely inconsistent with the villain's behaviour to that point and is essentially Home Alone on stereoids. A great disappointment.

– Sugith Varughese, Toronto, Canada (NY Times comment by poster)

[bjmdds]

Let Down
Read the reviews, saw all the advanced trailers ,and then was let down by the movie. This is not the from my video library. No cool cars or gadgets, no iconic bond girl(s), ho-hum villian, and just an okay action sequence. I found myself (and many other movies goers during my setting) bored through a majority of the movie and hoping for something to remind me that I was watching a JB movie. However not all was bad, M's death was tender and delivered a great passing of the torch set up; seeing the old Aston Martin was a delight; and night scenes of Macau were brillant.

– RP, Virginia (NY Times comment by poster)

[bjmdds]

New Yorker magazine: "“Skyfall” marks the fiftieth anniversary of the mother and father of all franchises. It would be lovely to announce that the new Bond movie is scintillating, or at least rambunctiously exciting, but “Skyfall,” in the recent mode of Christopher Nolan’s “Batman” films, is a gloomy, dark action thriller, and almost completely without the cynical playfulness that drew us to the series in the first place. “Skyfall” offers portents of the end, of the possible termination of 007 (Daniel Craig) and also of the Tennyson-quoting M. (Judi Dench); and it suggests, too, the looming irrelevance of M.I.6, which turns out to be not the powerful center of intelligence but just another station in a world of infinitely hackable network. In terms of spectacle, the Bond franchise has long been overtaken by its rivals, and in this movie many of the action sequences, including an apparent death by drowning, seem borrowed from other recent movies (see the watery plunge in “Bourne”).

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/c ... z2BerGBz4j"

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/c ... z2BeqZuPXF

[Capt. Sir Dominic Flandry]

NY Post also critical.

http://danielcraigisnotbond.com/forum/v ... =74&t=3388

[The Sweeney]

Still showing at 93% on Rotten Tomatoes. I think its fair to say the majority of reviews have been positive, even in the US.

[Jermaine76]

What I'm about to say will be offensive to the anti-Craig members on this board. As an anti-Craig person, I did my best to go watch this film without any prejudices. It was very hard. I immediately started to hate on Craig from the first 30 seconds. But I'll have to admit that he did a pretty good job in this film. His one-liners were better, he wasn't mumbling like he did in CR. In short...he did his job.

[The Sweeney]

What I'm about to say will be offensive to the anti-Craig members on this board. As an anti-Craig person, I did my best to go watch this film without any prejudices. It was very hard. I immediately started to hate on Craig from the first 30 seconds. But I'll have to admit that he did a pretty good job in this film. His one-liners were better, he wasn't mumbling like he did in CR. In short...he did his job.

I think this is the most shocking thing I've ever read on here........

Glad to hear you actually enjoyed it though Jermaine. I'm all for Bond fans enjoying Bond movies, even the films I don't particularly like (Brozzas).